


Moulting

by unhinged (anti60ne)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, Symbolism, Weird Plot Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 14:17:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1513574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anti60ne/pseuds/unhinged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Upon arrival in Seoul, Luhan undergoes an unexpected transformation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moulting

**Author's Note:**

> A (kind of) birthday (and 1-yr anniversary) fic for my bias.  
> 鹿晗生日快乐♥

It started small, almost unnoticeable. White flakes that he found on his bed after he woke up. He might have missed them altogether if the sheets hadn’t been a uniform dark blue, bits of dead skin sprinkled on them like the beginning of snow on asphalt. But peeling was normal, Luhan thought. It was a natural process that the human body underwent to generate new cells and retire old ones. His first thought was that his skin was simply too dry; the air in Seoul was not as humid as that in Beijing. It was understandable that he was peeling. He just needed some lotion, that was all.

So he went to the nearest convenience store and made his first non-essential purchase in this foreign land. The first items he had bought were a SIM card and public transit card, and that was when he first landed almost a week ago. He had resisted buying anything else before school started—after all, he needed money to pay for tuition and textbooks. He was grateful that his college advisor back in Beijing had found him a homestay across town from Yonsei University, where he was enrolled for the upcoming fall semester. He had not yet decided if he wanted to stay beyond one semester; this was the first time he lived without his parents, surrounded by people speaking a different language, being apart from the things he used to know, like street signs written in Chinese and store clerks standing upright.

He stood in front of the toiletry aisle for a good five minutes, trying to figure out if the bottles with incomprehensible labels contained lotion or something for an entirely different purpose, like shampoo or conditioner or hair mousse. He was tempted to uncap the lid and pump out a mound of unidentified substance just to make sure, which he ended up doing when he was alone in the aisle.

After he arrived home—rather, the home of a warmhearted, overly hospitable Korean family—Luhan retreated to his room after a quick bow, a learned movement that was becoming reflexive. He took out from the plastic bag a 12-oz bottle of lotion, the name of which he slowly pronounced to be Romanized Cetaphil. He pumped out an ample amount and slathered it all over his arms, rolling up the sleeves of his t-shirt so he could reach the shoulders. His skin glistened slightly, the sheen of lotion visible under the fluorescent light. He went to bed satisfied.

The next morning, he found even more white flakes on his bed. Alarmed, he nearly leapt out of bed. He scrambled into the bathroom and stripped all of his clothes. He looked down and saw that his thighs had begun peeling, too. He turned around and peered over his shoulders into the mirror; there were random pink patches on his back, like a Pollock painting. He frowned, but didn’t think much of it. Dryness of skin wouldn’t heal overnight, he consoled himself. He put his clothes back on, piece by piece, slow and careful as if the fabric would chafe his skin and cause more flakes to come off. He went back into his room and stripped again, lathering Cetaphil all over his body from shoulder to toe.

The peeling seemed to subside after he began lathering lotion religiously—twice a day at first, then three to four times, then whenever he remembered. He used up the bottle within four days, then went out and purchased two more, the 20-oz ones this time.

Then it began to itch. He learned of the itching much later than the peeling, shocked to find streaks of scabs on his shins, his forearms, his neck. Tracing his fingers over the dotted line of maroon, Luhan racked his brain to recall how exactly these wounds got there. He even suspected paranormal activity when he was asleep—maybe a ghost had snuck beneath the covers and clawed at him at night. He shuddered and shook his head, perishing the thought.

He realized that he had been scratching himself when he woke up to a stinging pain in the dead of the night one time, his fingernails dragging across his calf.

The itching got worse day after day. He still lathered the same luxurious amounts of Cetaphil, but it didn’t seem to help at all. When he was awake, he was able to refrain from scratching, though it was inching toward the point of teeth-gritting. It was nighttime that he was afraid of, his hands out of conscious control.

He walked into a dermatologist clinic the morning he woke up to his inner thighs bleeding. The dermatologist asked him to strip down to his boxer briefs and examined his skin, gloved hands turning and bending his limbs into strange angles. She squeezed some opaque fluid from a tube and with a cotton swab applied it to the fresh wounds on his inner thighs. He explained to her, in broken Korean, that he had been scratching himself in his sleep, but he didn’t know why. His hands were fidgeting, not from the urge to scratch but because he somehow felt guilty, like he himself was to blame for inflicting damage on his body. She shot him a meaningful glance before returning her eyes to the computer and typing what must have been medical notes for his dermal condition. He waited with bated breath, gripping the edge of the examination bench as he fought the urge to raise his hands and scratch at a particular spot in his lower back.

The dermatologist sent him home with a bag containing two tubes of cortisone ointment and some prescribed advice to avoid hot showers and non-cotton clothing. And to stop scratching, so long as he could help it. He nodded, the feeling of itch pricking his fingertips. 

That night before going to bed, Luhan squeezed a line of ointment on his fingertip and rubbed it into every single spot under which a storm of itchiness brewed. The ointment made his skin feel cool, like he was doused with cold water, and he let out a relieved sigh as he climbed into bed. He slept, dreaming of clouds that smelled like mint.

With the ointment, the itching became tolerable and eventually impalpable. But Luhan soon realized the problem wasn’t itching, because he started to find white flakes on the sheets again. His skin was still peeling, even with a devoted regimen of thrice-a-day moisturizing and as-needed ointment application.  He was no longer scratching and his skin was no longer dry, but flakes of epidermis continued to shed, as if his skin refused to be a part of him. What was even more puzzling was that the peeling revealed not raw skin, but normal skin of a lighter color. There was nothing unusual about this new skin, except that it was uncovered by endless sheets of old skin.

Luhan didn’t understand.

The peeling caused him no pain or discomfort, but it was certainly unsettling. A constant dread pooled in the pits of his stomach, he felt like he was dying of a terminal disease with no known cure.

His Korean was not good enough yet to allow him to seek out specialists other than dermatologists, who would just tell him the same thing as the one that prescribed him cortisone. The most they could do was probably elevate the strength of the drug or advise him to get a different brand of dermatologist-tested lotion, but he highly doubted it would serve any substantial purpose. After all, the problem was not dryness or itching. His skin was just shedding on its own, white flakes coming off unprovoked but insistent, as if they were carrying out a sacred mission that must be completed no matter what.

The night before school started, Luhan took a long shower, compulsively checking whether the water temperature stayed lukewarm. Even though he had given up on finding a solution to his peeling skin, he still tried to do everything he could to prevent it from worsening (as if it could), including controlling the shower temperature, wearing only cotton, and remaining faithful to Cetaphil.

In the shower, he thought about Beijing as water poured over his head, drops bouncing off his eyelashes as he blinked. He thought about his previous home with his parents, and his current home with a couple who treated him like he was their own child. He thought about how terrified he was when the plane took off in Beijing, and how he had been tapping his feet anxiously as it landed in Incheon. He reminded himself of why he wanted to study abroad in this particular city, why he didn’t go to New York or Prague or London. The short flight home was one of the reasons but not the main one; Luhan had always been drawn to the Korean culture, the language, boundless opportunities and infinite unknowns waiting for him, calling his name.

But he would be lying if he said he wasn’t afraid, still, almost a month after he stepped foot on this land. He would be untrue to himself if he turned away from the inkling of uncertainty that never stopped bumping into the back of his mind, slowly chipping away at the resolve that had catapulted him onto this journey. But he was trying so very hard—to persevere through the hurdle of unfamiliar customs and language barriers, to be patient for his wings to strengthen so they could extend to full lengths, to be courageous and march into each tomorrow even if he was trembling.

He blinked into the growing steam as it suddenly hit him that he should get out of the shower. He turned off the water, eddies of unfinished thoughts slowly whirling down the drain.

After shower, Luhan stood naked, inches away from the full-length mirror in his room, door locked. His eyes bored into the mirror, fingers slowly tracing the skin splayed over his collarbones, his chest, his abdomen, his hips. There were even patches of pink in his groin, if he looked closely enough. His hand trailed back upward and unconsciously, he applied a little pressure as he dragged his fingertip across his chest. A thin slab of skin flung off of his finger as he lifted it up. He felt nothing as the skin peeled off, like it was just a layer of clothes that was meant to leave his body.

He peered closer into the mirror and saw that the old epidermis surrounding the area of new skin was curled up on one end, inviting his fingertips to pick at it. He pinched that end and slowly pulled it back like rolling up one side of a carpet, revealing misplaced objects underneath. The skin peeled off easily, and he felt no pricking or stinging. He raised his hand to his eyes and examined the sheet of skin; it looked wrinkled and inorganic, like a discarded piece of paper. He loosened his grasp and let it drop to his feet. He dragged his hands over his body the same way he would to straighten his shirt, if he had one on. Massive layers of skin came off as his hands lifted off his abdomen, and he watched, fascinated. Canals of pink skin flashed into his eyes before they faded into the fair tone of his normal skin color. He dragged a hand over his face, fingers running down his cheeks. A film of dead skin shed along with his alighting fingertips. He rubbed them together and felt his old skin disintegrate into coarse flakes that snowed on the floor.

He peeled back layer after layer, scales of skin falling off of his front and back, his hands and feet. It was startlingly effortless, strips shedding from a mere tug of the finger. Luhan pulled his eyes away from the mirror and sat down on the floor instead, adept fingers identifying unpeeled areas and nails sliding under the edge of yet another sheet of old skin. He peeled and rubbed until no more white flakes shaved off, no more incongruent tones running next to each other like lanes of an unpaved road.

He fell asleep on the floor, the comforting chill in the tiles cradling his new skin like a mother with her arms around a sleeping child. There he dreamed of flying across the city of Seoul, without wings because he didn’t need them.

The next morning, Luhan awoke to the sun beaming upon him through the window. He rolled onto his side and sat up, slightly disoriented from noticing white tiles underneath him instead of the dark blue sheets. He squinted as he looked for a shirt and boxers, which he quickly threw on before stumbling out the room and to the bathroom. He didn’t fully wake up until he splashed cold water onto his face. He felt it before he saw it.

His face felt strangely smooth, as if robed by a new layer of skin. He inched his face close to the mirror and stared. His face looked the same, but not the same. He touched his cheek lightly and, after a moment of hesitation, dragged his fingertip across.

The skin remained intact. No opaque films, no white flakes. The dead skin was gone and all that was left was new skin.

He widened his eyes and ran back into his room, where he nearly ripped his clothes off and frantically ran his hands all over his body. He even braved a light scratch on his arm, testing to see if his old skin was still there but just grew tougher. But nothing peeled off, his new skin as tenacious as young shoots that had just burrowed out of the soil.

His face tore into an unrestrained smile, and he burst into laughter, amazed at the transformation. His chest felt light as if fresh hope filled it to the brim and his core rejuvenated, like a marathon runner being handed a bottle of water on his way to the finish line.

The old was gone, the new had come. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
